Charlie Reese
President George W. Bush, squirming like a worm
Tue Aug 5 03:37:30 2003
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Little Bush Should Review Big Bush's Policies

President George W. Bush, squirming like a worm on a hook trying to explain why after 90 days we've found no evidence of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, keeps calling up the past.

"We know Saddam had chemical weapons because he used them on his own people," Bush says quite often with his little-boy smile, as if that explained everything. Of course, what he neglects to mention is that the incident he is referring to occurred in 1988 — 15 years ago. Since then, Iraq has never used chemical or biological weapons on anybody.

The president ought to have studied general semantics, which, in recognition that everything is constantly changing, uses a technique of dating. General semantics would say that Iraq-1988 is not Iraq-2003. What Iraq had in 1988 is not justification for going to war in 2003.

Another thing that the president always fails to mention is that at the time of the 1988 attack, the United States made apologies for Iraq, implying in a U.S. Army study that the deaths might have been caused by Iranian weapons and that at any rate the villagers were just caught in a battle zone.

Scarcely one year after that attack, which the current Bush loves to cite as a reason to go to war 15 years later, his own daddy, President George Herbert Walker Bush, signed National Security Decision 26, which declared: "Normal relations between the US and Iraq would serve our long-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East. The US should propose economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior and increase our influence with Iraq. ... We should pursue, and seek to facilitate, opportunities for US firms to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy."

Following that up, the president's daddy approved $1 billion in loan guarantees for Saddam Hussein in 1990.

As a matter of fact, irony of ironies, just four months after that gas attack the current president likes to mention, Bechtel won the contract to build a huge petrochemical plant in Iraq. Guess who just got the big contract to rebuild Iraq in 2003? Bechtel, of course.

There is a well-documented article on how the United States helped Iraq not only with its war against Iran, but also with its weapons of mass destruction program. You'll find the story at www.greenleft.org.au/back/2002/506 /506p12.htm.

As you will learn from the article, the subject is also covered in a couple of books. It's funny how in America, political Alzheimer's disease is so widespread. Politicians like our current president want you to live in the present only and forget the context. Just believe anything he says.

As a quick aside, the insanity of Washington is further shown by the fact that on the same day last week, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., claimed that the president had classified the famous 28 pages in the new intelligence report to protect Saudi Arabia, while down the street, the Saudi Arabian foreign minister was at the White House, demanding that those pages be declassified. Talk about strangers passing in the night.

Sad to say, there is often no relationship among what politicians say, what the facts are and what their real motives are. To be blunt, they sometimes lie. More often, they don't know what the facts are and read whatever is put in front of them. American policy seems to be made opportunistically from week to week, always with an eye on money and domestic politics.

I can tell you the origin of the campaign to link Saudi Arabia to the attacks on Sept. 11 — a bunch of ambulance-chasing lawyers in the Big Apple looking for even the flimsiest excuse to sue Saudi Arabia. It is entirely a false charge. The Saudi government had nothing to do with the attack. Trying to blame the Saudi government because 15 of the hijackers were Saudi citizens is as much of a non sequitur as blaming the U.S. government for Tim McVeigh's act of terrorism. Terrorists are human beings, and like everyone else, have to be from somewhere.

http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20030804/index.php

Open-Air Nuthouse

I've said before that our poor country sometimes resembles an open-air insane asylum. Alas, here are two more pieces of evidence to support that assertion:

1. New York City has decided to fund a high school strictly for homosexuals.

2. The Pentagon planned to set up a "futures market" in which investors could speculate on such things as terrorist acts, assassinations and the overthrow of governments. As Jack Paar used to say, "I kid you not."

Fortunately, enough people in Congress were outraged by this latest wacky idea from the Pentagon that the fearless bureaucrats have backed off. They already had a Web site for what they euphemistically referred to as the Policy Analysis Market. Apparently, they reasoned that the famed invisible hand of the market would be a better predictor of future terrorist acts than our intelligence agencies. It was to be set up so you could, in effect, bet money on who would get assassinated or which government would get overthrown.

Well, given the record, tea leaves and the readers of entrails from roadkill would be better predictors than the CIA, the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) or all the other alphabet organizations in the so-called intelligence community. One day, Americans are going to ask their politicians just what we get for the $40 billion these spooks spend every year, aside from mythical weapons of mass destruction and a failure to protect Americans from terrorists.

Nevertheless, belief that market forces could predict political events shows an insane, cultlike faith in capitalism. You would think somebody in the Pentagon would have remembered the millions of Americans who lost trillions of dollars in the last market collapse. What made them think that the market would be any better at predicting murder and revolution than it is in predicting a good economic future?

As for the homosexual high school, this is being done on the grounds that homosexual students are harassed and bullied. Well, are we going to build separate high schools for everybody who gets teased or bullied — skinny kids, fat kids, freckled kids, redheads, not to mention blacks, Hispanics, whites and Asians?

In the first place, the homosexual lobby greatly exaggerates the alleged harassment of homosexuals, in my opinion. Most of the young people I've talked to are quite tolerant. And why shouldn't they be, given that they are being brainwashed daily by the media, Hollywood and television to accept homosexuality as normal behavior?

In the second place, as politically incorrect as it is to say, there is no homosexual gene. Homosexuality is a product of the environment and choices. Why, then, put 13-year-olds who are just coming to terms with sexuality in an environment that will definitely encourage them to choose homosexuality? That, it seems to me, is social engineering run amok.

Third, the answer to rude behavior and bullying is to toss the bullies and the yahoos out of school — not isolate their victims. This leads us to another case of social engineering run amok.

When I was a kid in school, the standard answer to bullies was to fight them. Teachers, at least in the civilized area of the Old South where I lived, paid no attention to students' fistfighting. Today, students face criminal charges if they swap punches in a public school. This is stupid. Boys are naturally competitive, and they need ways to let the steam out. Keep it bottled up by prohibiting fistfights and you might end up with a Columbine shooting spree.

Most schoolyard fights ended with a handshake and no serious damage to either participant. My first suspension came in the second grade when, after losing a fair fight to the biggest boy in the whole elementary school, I beaned him with a rock. When he recovered, we fought again with the same result, only this time I could see the pointlessness of getting beat up, beaning him with a rock, getting beat up, beaning him with a rock, etc., on into the indefinite future. I decided to shake hands instead and go back to being friends.

Unfortunately, the social engineers don't allow kids today to have the benefit of that kind of learning experience. Just as they call high spirits a medical condition, they call normal conflicts criminal behavior.

God save the nation that loses all of its common sense.